Observatory

I’ve managed to create the neatest thing ever, I built a fully functioning, automated observatory for imaging deep sky objects like galaxies, nebulae and other stellar objects. I planned the build based on purchasing a NexDome and automation kit, drew the building and chose the location at our family homestead. While the location isn’t ideal so near sea level, having a permanent observatory at the ready to take advantage of limited clear skies beat the alternative of packing gear in and out nightly, which wouldn’t fit into my lifestyle at all. The downtime that the pandemic created made my interest in astrophotography pique to the extent that I really doubled down on gear and put the time in to the point where I was finally getting images. I knew that to keep pursuing this wonderful hobby I wanted to be able to work remotely, (nights can be so cold!), and have automation built in so I could pick my targets and go to sleep, my data all collected for me in the morning. Any aspiring astrophotographer will tell you that countless hours have to go into capturing the data and processing it before you can get a good image. Stumbling around in the dark with sensitive gear and frozen fingers didn’t appeal to me, but building an observatory sure did!

The Build

My son Cam and I hand dug the foundation, which turned out to be a lot more work than I anticipated because of the rocky terrain we had to move, including digging a 4 foot deep hole for the concrete block for the pier. Unfortunately for us during the the time we were doing this there was a record breaking heat wave, with several days being in the 40 degree celsius range – UGH! Had I known what we were in for, I would have rented a machine.

The plot was laid out according to the drawings I had done based on the dimensions provided by NexDome. We also dug out a trench to the house for power and ethernet to be run in a conduit. The most challenging part was to dig through that cursed soil down to 48 inches deep to contain the foundation for the telescope pier!

 

As can be seen in the drawings/illustrations above, a great deal of thinking, dreaming, plotting and scheming went into this. I read many forum threads about observatory builds and gleaned so much from all of those amazing people in the astrophotography hobby and also from those that somehow live the dream of making this their profession. I am fortunate to have most of the required skills and the resources, not just financial, but professionally, to have been able to make this a reality. While my son and I did the mule work of digging and pouring the concrete for the pier foundation and the footings, I was able to scrounge a nice piece of thick-walled pipe and the necessary bits of steel from work and have one of my coworkers fabricate my custom designed pier. (Thank you Demi!) I had Cam once again to weld the redi-rod into a base that would be carefully buried in the concrete, serving as both reinforcement for the concrete and as a base that I could bolt the pier to with jacking bolts to get it nice and level.

The pier itself was fabricated from schedule 80 6-inch pipe, with holes for future wiring and support gussets on the bottom, made of 3/4″ plate. The pier base that was buried in the concrete form was 7/8-inch redi-rod that I bent and reinforced with rebar to make a rigid base. The pier plate on top was constructed with a custom pipe that fit snugly inside the pier. This had a 1/2-inch pipe blank welded to it with a single 1/2-inch hole centered so that I could attach any adapter I wished. The outer diameter of this base was machined with height adjustment grub screws so that I could fine tune the level and get it exact. Finally, this 6-inch insert sat in the top of the thick-walled pier locked in place by 8 – 3/8-inch grub screws. I fretted and fumed for quite a bit of time looking at many different pier designs and reading specifications to make sure I had the headroom to get as large of a telescope as I may want.

Many of us have “aperture fever” when it comes to astrophotography, and I wanted to be sure to not have to redo this step. One of my considerations was the mount that I currently owned, a very good copy of a SkyWatcher EQ6-R Pro, and one that I was looking to upgrade to, the well-reviewed EQ8-R Pro. As for telescopes, though the NexDome claimed to have the headroom for up to a 14-inch Schmidt Cassegrain or a 6-inch refractor, my threshold financially was for somewhere in the neighbourhood of an 8-inch reflector. Once you get above that, things start to get ridiculously expensive. However, once all this carefully planned and executed work was complete, it was fairly obvious that my design was going to certainly hold anything I was going to mount to it!

The next step was the slab itself, which Cam assisted with once again, along with my good friend Gabe, who came over and did the finishing;

Note the wiring, 2 – 15 amp circuits, ethernet and the slab being slightly lower than the sill, this was to accommodate some materials I had purchased and not used on a different project, in floor heating!

Next the walls went up.

Then the roof and integrated support for the dome rotation ring. This was a tricky little bit of geometry, coordinating the angles and making sure the rotation ring was as level and round as possible, while allowing the very shallow grade roof the same angle for water run-off in every direction. While the protection and functionality were the main reasons for building this in the first place, esthetics are important too. I wanted this automated building to look good too.

I sheeted the roof perimeter, then fiberglassed and gelcoated to waterproof. I built the dome support ring using laminated plywood and installed the dome wheel structure.

Assembled the dome and had a few friends help me lift it on. I had a waterproof observatory!

Added some siding to spruce it up, one day I’ll paint it nicely but for now it’s just the raw siding.

A quick look from one of the inside cameras.

And the project as it currently sits, not quite finished but waterproof and very much fully functional. I am able to image remotely from anywhere I have internet access.

I will keep updating this as I get more stuff finished and some images processed. So far it’s been a fairly wet winter with not too many clear nights, and what clear time I have had, I’ve been learning and configuring software, setting up imaging routines, testing, failing, trying again and generally succeeding. This has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but I’m proud to say I dreamed of it, researched it, planned it and built it myself, with some heavy lifting done by my son Cam, and with the help of Gabe and Demi when we poured concrete and lifted the dome onto the building.

October 2023

In between work, poor seeing and just overall laziness its taken some time to get to some image processing. I’ve run sequences for data collection very consistently when we’ve had good seeing, and this observatory is tuned quite well and has proven to be quite reliable – its been a long journey. Without further ado, here are some of the results – finally!

Barnard 161

Barnard 161 is the dark patch near the bottom in the constellation Cephius – this was captured with a mono camera using narrowband filters and processed using the Hubble pallete.

M42

The Orion nebula – my first stab at this. I only get about a month a year to observe this from my location because of trees, and of course that month is in winter and clear skies are rare. I’ll keep collecting data on this and hopefully the quality will increase.

M45

The Pleides – this was the first successful image I have processed using LRGB filters and a mono camera.

SH2 108

This is actually a very rough picture I managed to process from some data I didn’t even realize I had. I’ll have to revisit a lot of pictures I’ve captured since the observatory has been running!

NGC 6914

An area of Cygnus – the target name is actually the blue stars and nebulous region in the middle. I’m going to change scopes over the winter and recapture this area zoomed way in from what this picture shows, but a beautiful region of the sky nonetheless.